Over 65% MBA seats remain vacant

The MBA degree, once coveted, seems to have lost its sheen. A global slowdown and lack of employment opportunities have taken this course the engineering way with seats going abegging.

Figures provided by joint director for technical education Gulab Thakre for the Nagpur region show a disturbing trend of students losing interest in taking up courses in local colleges. Out of 5,100 MBA seats in 56 colleges of six districts under Nagpur region, only 1,770 have been taken after the end of all admission rounds. This means a whopping 3,330 seats - about 65% -- will remain vacant this year, across all colleges coming under Nagpur University.

The situation seems same across the state. DTE sources claimed that out of over 45,700 MBA seats in Maharashtra, only 12,321 seats were filled so far. Some 37 colleges surrendered over 2,000 minority seats for general category in order to get more students. Clearly, the MBA bubble has burst in the state.

Interestingly, some less known and new colleges got good response with a majority of their seats filled up. They include- Kamla Nehru Mahavidyalya, Green Heaven Institute, NIT Graduate School, JD College of Engineering, and Tulsiramji Gaikwad-Patil College among others. DTE sources, however, added that they had received many complaints of irregularities by colleges that were also application receipt centres (ARCs) for the centralized admissions. They allegedly took password from candidates and changed the priority to put their own name on top.

They added the present number of students may increase slightly as many colleges had provisionally admitted final year students whose results were yet to be declared by NU and other universities.

DTE admits students into banned colleges

Despite NU's ban on 250 colleges for operating without teachers and infrastructure, DTE has allowed admission to a couple of them offering MBA courses. These are Kirsan Mission's Institute of Management at Gondia and Dr Arun Motghare College of Management in Bhandara. Thakre defended DTE's move stating that director Subhash Mahajan had taken legal opinion in this regard. "Even the high court hadn't banned admissions into these colleges. We have made it clear that the admissions would be subject to court's orders and students should do so at their own risk. I was surprised that despite being marked in red ink, the students took admissions in these colleges," he said.